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Comment by mort96 | Hacker News Reader

If you know someone who plays Minecraft on their Switch, or on their phone, or on their tablet, or on their Xbox, or if they play it on their Windows PC and were therefore railroaded into getting the Bedrock Edition, you can't play with them from Linux or macOS. You need a Windows PC with Bedrock Edition to play with them. Minecraft is a perfect example of Microsoft taking a cross platform game and using their power to turn previously well supported non-Microsoft platforms into second class citizens.

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It’s infuriating because MS could literally press a button and make Bedrock available for Mac, since the Education edition (literally Bedrock) is already on Mac.

To MS’ credit, they were fast (~10 minutes) processing my refund for the Mac edition, and they saved me $30 because the iPhone Bedrock is $10 and works perfectly at full frames with minimal input lag when mirrored to my Macbook Air M1.

I use my Switch pro controller which “just works” when paired to my phone while my nephew plays on his Switch. I have an iPhone SE 2nd gen.

/edit we have to play on a realm because P2P cross-platform multiplayer is hilariously broken on Switch and MS timeline for fixing it seems to be “hmmm never”

TBQH "Mac edition" aka Java edition is the version most experienced gamers want, maybe unless all your friends are on bedrock already. Java edition has all the good mods, including mods that add content and mods which just provide QoL fixes to the vanilla experience. Bedrock players can join Java edition servers if the Java server is running the geyser mod, so if your server admin knows what he's about your bedrock edition friends can still play with everybody else (hence the above maybe.)

Totally agree with this, though even with Geyser Bedrock players are second class citizens (some mods don't translate well to Bedrock clients, e.g., furniture mods).

Java is the better way to play Minecraft generally, which is unfortunate because the performance is still really bad.

The performance gap definitely exists, but at least it has narrowed a bit with recent releases. Particularly, with the 1.18 release Java edition finally separated render distance and simulation distance. Bedrock edition (and java edition mods like spigot) had this already for years, but before 1.18 in Java edition you couldn't turn up your render distance without also increasing the number of chunks your game was simulating. For single player (where the chunk processing is happening on your computer, not the server), this makes a huge difference.

Yes, same for Linux. During lockdown my kids wanted to catch up with their friends by playing together on Minecraft, but as we had windows at home (and no switches in the store) it was a pain. Thank goodness for the work of someone called Christopher who made a Linux bedrock launcher.

Weirdly, despite issues and delays getting the latest versions to work, I'd argue this is the best way to enjoy minecraft. Very smooth low CPU load compared to Win10 or Java, and works well with keyboard and mouse.

The story with Java vs Bedrock edition is far more complicated. Microsoft, even with all of their resources, is in a bit of a pickle with this one.

First off, while the two games are roughly 95% the same, they are entirely different codebases (Java & C++), with their own bugs, quirks, incompatible formats, protocols, a couple unique mechanics, etc.

Java Edition (the OG Minecraft) has too huge of a following; it was heavily reverse-engineered early on, with a couple independent efforts (Fabric, Forge) creating modding bridges that enabled a thriving community of mod makers, that many servers heavily rely on. Even if you only consider the creator communities on YouTube (like Hermitcraft, Empires SMP, SciCraft) - some creators from these communities have millions of subscribers. You can't neglect Java edition because you will alienate an enormous part of your community and basically kill the brand. In fact Mojang's strategy is usually to release new features in JE development snapshots, and trickle them to Bedrock Edition once a stable JE release is cut.

But JE is also some of the most poorly-optimised software in existence, even after you install third-party mods (Sodium, Iris) that fix a lot of the performance issues. To even have a remote chance at supporting all the underpowered platforms, Bedrock Edition (formerly Pocket Edition) had to be created. Mojang/Microsoft is in one hell of a pickle, maintaining two parallel implementations of their core product, bending over their backs to maintain feature parity, with no real hope for cross-play ever.

Now why is there no Bedrock for Mac & Linux, is indeed a very good question. Perhaps it has less to do with being evil and more to do with the fact that these are likely already niche, as a total slice of JE installations, and Microsoft doesn't see a market there. Personally I am not bothered, as I prefer Java Edition anyway, but I understand why someone could get upset over it.

Funny thing is, thanks to Minecraft JE being Java, it works quite well even on completely unsupported platforms. The community built custom cross-platform launchers, figured out pretty quickly how to run the game natively on M1 Macs, heck it runs perfectly fine under *BSDs as well.

> The community built custom cross-platform launchers, figured out pretty quickly how to run the game natively on M1 Macs

Java Edition works really well even on my A12 iPad Pro using Jitterbug!

That Bedrock supports every major console + Android/iOS but Linux/macOS had to stick to the (still updated) Java version is not really a comparable situation. Even if your view is it was done solely as an abuse of power you're not going to find many game companies looking to support 4 major 3rd party ecosystems get blamed for turning Mac/Linux into a second class citizen by not keeping it synced with the other releases - the markets are just tiny.

Well-supported non-Microsoft platforms were turned into second class citizens after the IP was bought by Microsoft. That's what's important here.

Bedrock clients can join Java edition servers if the Java server is running the Geyser mod, which acts as a compatibility shim between the two. It works pretty well.

Of course it would be nice if Microsoft/Mojang bridged the gap themselves instead of leaving it to the community, but that'll never happen.

Yeah, and similarly, you can probably get Bedrock to run on Linux through WINE. You can also play Breath of the Wild on Windows with community-made emulators. But what's interesting in this question isn't what's technically possible through enough ingenuity from the community, but what's officially supported.

Bedrock edition through WINE would be a very shitty experience, particularly since Java edition runs so well on Linux, and because WINE (afaik) wouldn't help MacOS users. But the Geyser compatibility shim really does work properly. Between these two options, Geyser is the clear winner.

> "But what's interesting in this question isn't what's technically possible through enough ingenuity from the community, but what's officially supported."

I confess I'm not sure what "interesting" means in this context. What is officially supported matters much less to me than what is possible and practical. I think generally, experienced gamers are comfortable installing mods and are better served by whichever engine has better modding support (be it official or unofficial.)

The context is that Sony claims to be afraid Microsoft's acquisition of ActiBlizz would make Call of Duty Xbox-exclusive. Sony's fears would be realised if Microsoft made CoD officially Xbox-exclusive, even if there was a community-maintained workaround which would make it technically possible for IT people to play CoD on PlayStation.

The way Microsoft is treating Minecraft with respect to Linux and macOS would be an example of what Sony is afraid of, which goes against my parent comment's claim that the article "ignore[s] Minecraft that not only continues to get support on other platforms but other platforms also get any of the spinoffs"; I claim that Minecraft is a perfect example of the kind of thing Sony should be afraid of.

Ah yes. Well, I evaluate the situation as a gamer, not as though I were Sony. Sony will do whatever Sony wants to do, I won't try to predict that since Sony has a history of doing things which seem irrational. For instance they forbid Fallout/Skyrim mods from adding content on the playstation edition of those games, even though such mods are permitted on the Xbox editions. Inexplicable, I couldn't have predicted that before they did it, but that's Sony for you.

I agree that the situation is different when evaluated from the perspective of a highly technically skilled player than from either the perspective of a less technical person or the perspective of a company which wants to do business with less technical people.

> or the perspective of a company which wants to do business with less technical people.

Trying to understand Sony through such a lens is folly, see: the inexplicable limitations on Fallout/Skyrim modding. "less technical people" with Xboxes enjoy modding Fallout and Skyrim, but Sony chose to severely limit that on their platform and the reasons they gave never made any rational business sense.

Sony is best understood as an irrational animal with a history of biting people without apparent provocation. Sony leadership does not understand many if not most of the businesses Sony is involved in, so they self-sabotage often.

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